Well, I guess I won't be buying from Amazon for a while...
Amazon has yanked all print and eBook versions of Macmillan books in a dispute over pricing of eBooks. Basically, Macmillan wants to be able to sell eBooks at a variety of prices, Amazon wants every eBook at the same price.*
My big beef with this isn't that Amazon's pulled the eBooks. Hey, if they aren't happy with the eBook deal Macmillan's been offering, well, that's their business. What bugs me is yanking all the dead-tree editions. What does eBook pricing have to do with dead trees? Not a damn thing. This is simply a large company trying to use their near-monopoly in one market to enforce their control over another market. I dunno about the rest of you, but personally, that sounds pretty anti-competitive to me...
So for now, I won't be buying anything from Amazon. Chapters' online ordering isn't quite as good, but it is a heck of a lot better than it was for the first few years after they got bought by Indigo.
The big thing that confuses me is why Amazon thinks this is a good idea. After all, the big draw of Amazon is they have every book you could want -- or at least, they're more likely to have it than anyone else. Yanking every book by a major publisher means that there's a HUGE list of books that they no longer carry, making Amazon a limited supplier... which means they're inconvenient. Kinda the opposite of what made them successful. If Amazon was a true monopoly, this would be a smarter tactic, but they've got enough realistic competition that it's reasonable to think that this could drive away a significant number of their customers.
* Sound like Apple's iTunes stance back in the day?
My big beef with this isn't that Amazon's pulled the eBooks. Hey, if they aren't happy with the eBook deal Macmillan's been offering, well, that's their business. What bugs me is yanking all the dead-tree editions. What does eBook pricing have to do with dead trees? Not a damn thing. This is simply a large company trying to use their near-monopoly in one market to enforce their control over another market. I dunno about the rest of you, but personally, that sounds pretty anti-competitive to me...
So for now, I won't be buying anything from Amazon. Chapters' online ordering isn't quite as good, but it is a heck of a lot better than it was for the first few years after they got bought by Indigo.
The big thing that confuses me is why Amazon thinks this is a good idea. After all, the big draw of Amazon is they have every book you could want -- or at least, they're more likely to have it than anyone else. Yanking every book by a major publisher means that there's a HUGE list of books that they no longer carry, making Amazon a limited supplier... which means they're inconvenient. Kinda the opposite of what made them successful. If Amazon was a true monopoly, this would be a smarter tactic, but they've got enough realistic competition that it's reasonable to think that this could drive away a significant number of their customers.
* Sound like Apple's iTunes stance back in the day?